This is the smartest thing I've ever heard of
on
GOVNET In the Works
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· Score: 3, Interesting
This is stupid. What bout PPTP/VPN? Why can't they just make a virtual network that runs over the Internet like every other business is doing?
Because every other business isn't doing that. Every other business is buying cheaper-than-Internet point-to-point bandwidth and getting service guarantees. The government at least recognizes that outsourcing isn't as good deal as the PHB's say it is. T-1's have dropped precipitously lately.
The infrastructure costs are minimal because you aren't running redundant wiring. It's just as secure, in fact, it's more secure because you are going to be extra paranoid about things like password schemes and encryption levels if it has to survive some public data transfer points.
What does bandwidth from a "real" Internet provider at $1/bandwidth and $1/short-haul pipe buy you over direct lines at $1.50/long-haul pipe? Not latency, not reliability, not price, and certainly not administrative flexibility.
Your comment about intentionally introducing holes into a network to impose discipline on its engineering is, frankly, an insult to those of us left who aren't into fucking around and like to go home at 5pm.
To make an analogy, this guys is suggesting that every government office get a tin can and a string so that they can communicate securely because there's alwaye the potential for someone to tap the phone lines.
By your logic, the government shouldn't buy its own private PBX systems or use VoIP or lease trunk lines to other branch offices because, well, isn't the public switched telephone network already there? He's suggesting that they use existing technology to, among other things, build a government-wide internal phone system, which happens to be a sound money-saving idea. The government has just as much reason to do so as any other large corporation.
Not that making information sharing quite so easy will be good for civil liberties or anything.
As far as the user interface goes it should have a complete abstraction from applications and the file system leaving the user to only be concerned with documents.
Who says the next (or next next) generation of OSes will even have file systems as we know them? They might very well be based upon object stores, with a perfunctory and optional name-object mapping service on the top, and I understand that an implementation of this scheme for Windows is on the roadmap. Or applications? Maybe documents really will become objects containing objects to a potentially infinite depth and they'll search themselves and render themselves to various media.
I do agree that the representation to the user should be driven by the tasks a user will need to perform.
The reason they should also have mouse and keyboards are for security so passwords etc wouldn't have to be spoken
Thumbprint readers? Physical tokens? Smart cards? All of these exist.
and so things you're doing could be kept somewhat private.
Touch screens (which would be necessary for plenty of other things anyway, as you later acknowledge). Soft keyboards? Electromyogram sensors that pick up the messages to the muscles of your vocal tract and translate those subtle movements into words? All of these exist.
It should also accept natural language commands for complicated to speak text. The main example for this is programming. If I wanted to do:
for (int i = 1; i = 10; i++)
cout << i << endl;
I would like to just say 'for loop. local integer i from zero to ten step one begin. print i and end line. end loop'. instead of having to articulate each puntuation symbol as 'for open parenthesis int i equals 1 semicolon i less than equal ten semicolon i plus plus close parethesis. enter. c out less than less than i less than less than end l', not to mention if I had to put spaces in there too.
Why bother translating the natural language to C++? If you can parse the command to generate the code, you can parse and execute the command just as well. Let's try Pascal, with a little help from the development environment: "program foo [opens file, moves to program block] var [moves to global var block] i integer [inserts : before integer and ; after] begin [moves to program begin block] for i becomes 1 to 10 do begin writeln [inserts (] i sem [inserts ) before;] end end [inserts full stop]". 18 words, from zero to completed source file. Perhaps a language designed for vocal programming would take a page from Perl's or Lisp's books and sling lists around: "foreach member in set 1 through 10 do output member newline done". Seriously, man, try some new languages. Live a little.
It should also be noted that this type of interface is for the 'average' user not the average slashdot reader since we all like our keyboards and CLIs.
I only like them because they're often the fastest way to get $job done with the level of control I desire. If natural language processing or gesture processing passes it on the inside curve, I'll happily give it up, so long as I don't have to give up my privacy to salivating marketeers in the bargain.
Almost all the pieces for a sane computer are out there, and according to The Register MSFT is already working on decoupling the user base from things like files. They expect it to be ready by 2004 or so, which means we have until 2005 (the probable actual release date) to best them.
to show them as the warmongers they are, and to show, how they misuse religion for their own personal goals.
Why would he? It hits too close to home. Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Oral Roberts, and Ralph Reed would have to meet a firing squad to maintain any semblance of intellectual honesty. Mind you, I'd join up in a minute if they were next, but as a head of state, you don't do that sort of thing to the coalitions that serve your interests such as by getting you elected.
The patent was on puasing a LIVE TV stream. That would involve buffering on some end to keep the stuff that normally would get lost in a live one way feed like most tv signals.
We called this a FIFO since well before the Reagan Era. All that's particularly novel is the application (and the availability of appropriately sized FIFOs).
I guess the trick is to patent whatever costs $5k to put in a box today, because it'll cost about $100 within ten years.
"1) why was X dying? I've never had X die except in the rarest occasions or more routinely on systems I had really futzed with. "
X dies frequently on my system. It really depends on the version of XFree86 you use + your vid card. The error messages aren't terribly helpful to a newbie either.
Careful procurement reduces X crashing. So does using a competent browser (Netscape 4.x was not this).
"Furthermore, if that was a concern, a journaling FS like XFS could have solved your problem."
Um, right answer to the wrong question. Journaling file systems help, but if you fsck fuck have your drive (or the media itself) forget it. Ask anyone running Windows 2000, even with journaling already turned.
A power-cycle could do that. A simple reset wouldn't have broken the fs. I haven't ever had reiserfsck ask me anything. Ever. It takes its four seconds of fame per boot and moves along.
If you damage the drive or media, why are you buying such cheap disks anyway? Aren't you running a business on those?
The average user upgrades their GUI (Windows) every 2-3 years. Things are going to change rapidally. The only problem, as it's been said many times before, is that Linux doesn't have the "advantage" of having a single, standardized desktop. At least if you know one version of Windows, you pretty much have a good idea how the next one is going to act.
That's part of the problem. The other problem is that Linux GUIs don't have a Linus Torvalds to bitchslap people in an entertaining way and lead coders toward one goal. I'd love to take a bullwhip to all these wieners who think overriding or ignoring the user's color preferences, or drawing pretty pictures of LED's and molded plastic front panels, none of which match any other app, makes a computer usable.
My company has $100 million worth of assets. Some companies are easily in the billions. Do you have any idea how difficult it would be to move that amount of money simply because your browser doesn't work? The bank is supporting 92% of the internet browsing populations -- what more can you ask for? If you go to the vast majority of banks and ask "Does your banking portal work with Linux broswers?" they won't have a clue what you are talking about.
If you've got $100 million in the bank and you're a relatively high-profit customer, you've got more of an ear listening to you than the small depositor. Even then, the pragmatic thing to do might be to suck it up and run WINE.
This discussion reminds me of an interesting proposal I ran into back in college, that was actually strongly supported by the 'radical feminists' on campus:
Rather than attempting to control/limit/ban porn, a more effective approach would be to remove all copyright protection from all forms of pornography, thus eliminating the profit motive, thus destroying the market for commercial porn and ending the 'exploitation' of wymyn'
Didn't they say the same exact thing about open source? Hell, some of the best (and probably least exploitive) porn on the net is public domain amateur stuff on the Gnutella network.
I will be the first to admit that a teen masturbating in the bathroom is a lot different than an individual who gets off on a harem of children. But again, in degree. There is no hard and fast boundary between the two behaviors.
So far, my money's on "complete idiot". Maybe "religious fundamentalist", depending on how bad your reasoning is later on.
There are several qualitative differences which your simplistic views on sexual propriety refuse to recognize: the involvement of other people, the lack of consent, the possible lack of understanding on the part of the other, the social taboos against the other, the purposes for which the activity is sought (self-love vs. self- or other-hate),and so forth. Then again, the Big Guy threatened to kill you if you fall out of line, so it's not surprising you ignore these other dimensions of comparison.
So if you are still reading, here is why I think the way I do in very brief form: Essentially every major world religion and culture advocates or prescribes chastity: no sexual partners until marriage, and only one after that with the intent to produce children. Why is this such a common view? Perhaps because it "works".
I hope you're not trying for any logic points here. If I remember my logical fallacies correctly, you're begging the question and/or appealing to false authority. Incidentally, Maggie Gallagher made this same point in an article on why we should shun gays, and it was every bit as nonsensical coming from a traitor to womanhood as from you.
Consider this: Essentially every major world religion has gotten major by taking control of its adherents' procreative powers, which are firmly tied into human expression and thought, and harnessing them toward the religion's worldly political ends. Sexual deprivation renders people more gullible, less willing to think, more willing to wield gross power and kill. By controlling the purposes for which sexual energy may be "innocently" expended, you can "guilt" your adherents into breeding your religion into majority. Catholicism in a nutshell.
It's equally possible we just don't hear about the sex-positivity of other religions because the military-ecclesiastical complex destroyed every remnant of their existence.
Next idea. What is the conceptual dividing line between the following spectrum of sexual activity: masturbation, being masturbated with your consent, giving someone a hand job with their consent, oral sex, oral sex with someone slightly younger than yourself, oral sex with someone lots younger than yourself (still consensual, still age of "majority"), and lastly oral sex with a minor who has given consent (and of course that last one is the real controversial step).
Nice try. You take a bunch of disparate sexual acts and try to compress them onto one dimension.
The only observable data from this is how bad you think these particular sex acts are, and frankly no one cares what you do with your own genitals.
Furthermore, the only commonality between any of these acts is that you happen to think these are all "bad" sex acts. Your conjecture is unprovable, unless you appeal to the same authorities to whom you have given control over your sexuality to, which ultimately degenerates to "Because He said so" or "Because He threatened to kill me if I don't". This is hardly the sort of justification a thinking man would accept.
What age exactly is it when someone can give consent? Is it 15? Is it 14? Is it puberty? Is it 10? There is no scientific means known at this time to decide that age, only a legalistic mechanism that says such an age is too young.
There is no hard and fast dividing line because the capacity to meaningfully consent to sexual activities depends on their understanding of sexual activity, its effects and risks, its possible consequences to their community and their standing in it, is aware of and has chosen ways to mitigate negative risks, and is scrupulously honest. Certain elements of socialization happen at different ages in different children, different households, and different cultures. There can be 14-year-olds who are capable of giving meaningful consent by this definition, but who simply aren't interested in playing with someone else yet. There can be 25-year-olds who, as a consequence of congenital or hereditary mental illness, are not capable of consent under this definition (and, looking around me, plenty of 25-year-olds who fail just by that last criterion of honesty).
Next idea. At what point is safe sex really safe?
There is no such thing as 100% safe anywhere in life, you fool. If you want 100% safe, check yourself into a mental institution and pretend no other inmates will assault you and that the place won't burn down. Otherwise, grow up and deal with the fact that LIFE IS RISKY.
At what point is birth control really effective? Again, there is a whole spectrum of options here and they all have one thing in common: nothing is 100% certain to be safe or effective.
If you've been at all involved in the Internet rat race in a technical capacity, you understand something called "redundancy". You probably also have the capacity to multiply probabilities and to understand how probabilities are useful. Percentages are approximate, and per year:
Condom = 90% effective, including user error.
Oral hormonal contraceptive = 98% effective, including user error.
Spermicidal foam, jelly, etc. = 96% effective, including user error.
Vasectomy = I think this one is four or five nines (99.99% - 99.999%).
Tubal barrier methods: three nines (99.9%).
We assume a fertile lifespan of 35 years (14-49) for a female, that a single failure event is 100% likely to cause a pregnancy or STD, and that the woman is continually sexually active with a fertile and infected partner throughout that period. Using only condoms with an average amount of care, and assuming that a single failure event is 100% likely to cause pregnancy, the female can expect to become pregnant and/or infected three times during their fertile lifespan. By only involving herself with known, certified, uninfected partners, the risk of infection drops to zero. By adding oral contraceptives, taken with average care, the chances for a pregnancy drop to 1 in 15 throughout her fertile life. You can do the rest of the math, I'm sure.
I could go on with a number of other spectrums of options or behavior where the only real differences between the options are of degree rather than type
Don't waste your time; none of them stand up to serious rigor and none of them are anything but bald conjecture with nothing to back it up.
The only time there is a difference of type comes when you choose to be proactive about chastity, formal monogamy and procreation.
I don't believe so. I believe the difference of "type" comes from the spirit in which sexual gratification is sought and partaken of, and whether the two or more parties involved are honest and aboveboard about everything pertinent. If you want a broodmare, fine; just be honest and aboveboard about it so folks who think sex is more than a "duty to the Party" can avoid you.
I believe from the preceding points and others, that the only solution is actually a sort of moral conversion of our society, where people recognize the logical and societal consequences of their actions and change their moral standpoint on that basis.
You mean like how excessive procreation, in the era of lengthened lifespans, minuscule incidence of infant mortality, and the overvaluing of human life, might be harmful to society and the planet? You don't say.
What if you hear a song on the radio, want to buy the album, but don't know the artist or song name. Ever think of that?
That was the reason I've always used lyrics.ch. I don't think your method will work at all for finding a song based on the lyrics within it.
I've had very good success searching at Google on a couple of phrases from the song, maybe three or four words each, and maybe it takes a few tries because I have to change "got to" to "gotta" or the like. Even then, I get or can infer at least the title of the song and the performer, probably in excess of 90% of the time, and that's plenty to find an album. Unfortunately, this doesn't work so well on opera readings of Sappho's poetry, for example.
Although it isn't unhealthy, distilled water (pure H2O) tastes like shit. Your body is actually accustomed to the various minerals and whatnot that you'll find in most drinking water.
So you dope it with minerals just the same as bottled water plants do to turn distilled water into drinking water. Just add a fraction of a gram per gallon of baking soda, gypsum, and salt cake, mix well, and the product tastes just like bottled "spring" water.
... even though you shouldn't be screwing around in class anyway. HTH, HAND. Mod up whoever was talking about college as a service provider.
I'm also greatly amused by the technological equivalent to "Bring your note to the front of the class and share it with everyone". I still don't want to see that on a computer I own.
Ideally, you keep your secure keyring with you, on removable media, protected with an encrypted file system and some means of irrecoverable, instantaneous destruction. Smart cards are a good example -- with the right signal or the push of a button, they can destroy their contents irrecoverably. The US Government's own security regulations are a fairly good guide to current best practices with regard to data management, some of which are on Cryptome.
Is there any reason that the major news organizations don't PGP or MD5 sign their stories as posted on the web
That would prevent distributors and editors from editing the stories for space or spin. The latter has been observed -- many references to the positive effects of marijuana and the negative effects of prohibition have been snipped from wire stories published in (IIRC) the Dallas Morning News.
It could easily be ascertained that the site was being changed if Yahoo News were to include a signature at the bottom to check the veracity of the article.
You should have stopped while you were ahead. Go learn what cryptographic signatures really give you, and then stop by m-w.com to look up "veracity" and see if that's the same thing.
Anyway all you'd have to do is 0wn the signature machine, break enough signatures that they turn the alarm off, and the rest of the site is yours. Social engineering is often the most effective attack.
Here's a little snippet from PlanetEmu, a French emulation site:
<script>
<!--
function ctrlDown() {
if (event.ctrlLeft) {
alert("La source ne regarde que nous:)");
}
else {
if (event.ctrlKey) {
alert("La source ne regarde que nous:)");
}
}
document.body.focus();
} // --> </script>
Browse with Javascript and Java off. View source to get to whatever you may need. Most importantly, take your business elsewhere and tell lame web designers why.
cuz the most accesed part of linux is already in assembly, so you won't have huge speedups.
It's entirely possible they're doing something totally different from the way Linux does it. Maybe there are kernel primitives much closer to x86's particular brand of assembly (SIMD enhancements perhaps?) and every piece of code is examined to determine when and where using those things would make sense.
All the same, I think I'm with the "who cares" crowd on this one. What does it do besides "me too"? I don't think I'll care about any new OS until it's fully object-driven and secondary storage is transparent to the applications programmer. Then we'll talk.
Au contraire. I believe that you're more qualified to argue such things reasonably than the average religious clone, and because of such reasonableness you're more likely to take into account where the right to swing your morality stops. If the latter isn't true, then religious or not, I don't believe you have the right to the time of day, certainly not from me.
But if you are conservative, you're thinking is CLOSED?
conservative adj. 3 a : tending or disposed to maintain existing views, conditions, or institutions : TRADITIONAL
And that's "your", not "you're". If they brought back literacy testing as a precondition to voting, we wouldn't be having these problems.
If you're open to diversity of opinion, then you must accept ALL types of thinking!
I don't have to accept any types of thinking other than my own. Ideas themselves are the only germane point of argument.
Bush (not my favorite president to say the least) was struggling with some legitimate moral issues regarding stem cells from aborted fetus.
Fact check: he just banned recovery from not just embryos, which is what you get just after the fertilized ovum divides and several weeks before a fetus, but waste embryos from such sources as redundancy for fertility treatments. I don't see that there are any morald to discuss: you either take what life you can from it and flush it, or you flush it. Which one is more pro-life, and why aren't they being consistent?
Furthermore, most moral discussions are ignorant because the people involved are wailing and gnashing their teeth, usually to the exclusion of critically examining their own views, seeking out and examining evidence, and so on. If most Americans could be bothered to exercise any more discernment over their uninformed opinions besides "The guy in the black robe told me so", we wouldn't be having this battle.
And I don't buy the, "well, they were going to be gotten rid of anyway" argument. Just because someone else was going to kill your neighbor down the street if you didn't doesn't mean it's ok for you to go ahead and do it.
Your analogy makes no sense. You aren't accounting for the fact that the embryo is no longer a viable life form and, for a limited time, is a useful item from which to harvest parts. The situation is similar to that of a motorcycle crash victim. Would you not, with the blessing of the next of kin, harvest whatever organs you could use before they're no longer useful? Then what makes
fertilized eggs so special?
Forced-birthers are too hung up on the quantity of potential life and demonstrate almost no concern about the quality of life for those who have developed nervous systems and can appreciate it.
Their real concern is probably not life, but power. Religious extremists need to shut up and deal until such time as I can opt out of paying for oil wars in Saudi Arabia.
All in all, I think it's good that a leading technologist (who has done more for society than the
sadistic oppressive whore known as Mother Teresa) suggested that mysticism has no place in science.
In other words, Berlin takes the Mac approach of taking UI decisions away from app developers
... and putting it into the hands of users where they belong. The user is more important than the whims of some clueless artiste who happens to have the time and the energy to bang some segfaulting piece of code together with artsy-fartsy skins and inconsistent mouse controls. Get off your high horse, little boy.
Any time you add flexibility you create opportunities for both inconsistency and innovation; they're two sides of the same coin.
The beauty of Berlin is that UI innovations can be applied systemwide because the application developer is forced to pull his head out of their ass and think in terms of abstract actions and the UI developer is limited to thinking in terms of right-double-clicks. This is a superior way to do real UI innovation (as opposed to developer self-aggrandizement), as new paradigms can be explored globally with the flick of a switch, evaluated on how and where they work best and worst, tweaked to improvement, and again.
An application demanding that a double-right-click behave in a particular fashion is only an innovation in the Microsoft sense of the term.
As it turns out very few applications take advantage of that, but at least they have the choice instead of being told which method to use.
Berlin's message is this: application software micromanaging the user interface is a dead end, and rude too. Introducing a level of indirection gives the user control by plugging and unplugging toolkits to do things the app programmer never thought of. If the UI toolkit becomes scriptable, every well-formed Berlin client program becomes scriptable. If the UI toolkit supports blind users' I/O devices, every well-formed Berlin client supports blind users' I/O devices.
If you want to innovate, then innovate a new toolkit. I suspect you're less interested in innovation than shoving your ideas down the users' throats.
I've been a user of several self-hosted language environments, and a friend of mine has done major Forth hacking for the past ten years or so. From what I understand, the beauty of Forth is the extensibility, the tiny footprint, and the closeness to the metal.
Wouldn't this make Forth and similar small-footprint environments a natural choice for devices such as sub-$100 PDA's, and why does it seem that line of development is completely unexplored?
EPROM density, tight margins, and low write speed are just three reasons. Sockets, never mind ZIF sockets, are not cheap, and don't even think about SMT sockets. Sure, you can get an 8 megabyte flash EEPROM for about $10 each by the hundred, but you're looking at a good minute or three to burn the chip full. Besides, what happens when your burn fails halfway through?
I maintain that OS'es should save as much system state across power-downs as they can, along the lines of APM sleep/wake (or better yet using an OS built out of persistent objects that can boot instantly and page in whatever is needed, on demand). Hell, with that no-POSTing BIOS and APM sleep/wake, you can already do a ten-second power-on without harming any non-volatile memory devices whatsoever. THIS IS NOT ROCKET SURGERY, FFOLKES.
Anyone with more technical information, please comment.
Considering that almost all your information is wrong, I'll be happy to correct it as best I can.
The SPARC architecture does not use a BIOS with REAL mode drivers for booting.
The SPARC doesn't have or need real mode.
It has protected (or whatever it is in non-x86 parlance) mode drivers built right into the firmware.
No it doesn't. It has drivers written mostly in Forth bytecode, just capable enough to bootstrap the OS. See also: OpenBoot.
However, modern OSs (Windows, Linux, etc) need protected mode drivers
Drivers do not operate in a vacuum. Among other things, they need to initialize/uninitialize themselves, manage (allocate/free, map/unmap, lock/unlock) memory, cooperate with other drivers, and share various resources in the fashion that the host OS requires. None of that has squat to do with what addressing mode the processor is running in and everything to do with what OS is running, which is why OS'es come with their own drivers. See also: UDDI.
BY placing these right in the fimware Sun is able to smoke x86 performancewise ALWAYS.
Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. The weaknesses of the IA-32 architecture descend mostly from 20 years of backward compatibility for marketing purposes, and the resultant need to handle legacy crap from bit-banging 1980's programs and drivers to 16-bit-addressing DMA controllers to slow ISA peripherals to IDE controllers that you could still run on a PC/XT ferchrissake. More function = more silicon = longer critical path = slower.
I thin its time to ditch our legacy DOS hardware
Yes...
and start getting x86 machines with protected mode BIOS drivers.
The BIOS is history once any modern OS boots (with the possible exception of power management on laptops). What's in the bootstrap ROMs doesn't fscking matter once the OS is loaded.
The major problem is the chipsets and the 20-year-old designs they're based around. Drop in full 32-or-more-bit DMA controllers or require all peripherals be bus-master capable, segregate the ISA bus to its own out-of-the-way 16MB window somewhere (see: Apollo DNx000 family), hardwire a handful of interrupts and a hardcoded address range to each slot (see: EISA), drop the legacy keyboard/mouse interface, and redo IDE entirely (see: SCSI). While we're at it, let's scrap BIOS and replace it with OpenBoot. Now there's a machine free of legacy crap that might be worth writing home about.
What is required in my opinion is legislation (waits for the boos and hisses to stop) to require the Regional Bell Operating companies to lower the over priced bandwidth costs to the Internet service companies.
RBOCs don't often sell bandwidth to mom-and-pop ISP's. Most of the bandwidth sold in T-1 quantities is by either independent but slightly larger entities, or subsidiaries or divisions of long distance companies. I wouldn't be caught dead buying any service from the ILEC unless the only other choice is GTE/Verizon.
Local HDSL (aka T-1) loops are about as cheap as you'd want them. Any cheaper and your provider won't roll a truck immediately when it goes down.
Point being, if you don't know exactly what you're talking about, perhaps you shouldn't be proposing legislation, lest you be seen as the same sort of self-interested whiner that begs for perpetual copyright. Nobody owes anyone anything.
Slashdot Mirror
Not that making information sharing quite so easy will be good for civil liberties or anything.
-jhp
I do agree that the representation to the user should be driven by the tasks a user will need to perform.
Thumbprint readers? Physical tokens? Smart cards? All of these exist. Touch screens (which would be necessary for plenty of other things anyway, as you later acknowledge). Soft keyboards? Electromyogram sensors that pick up the messages to the muscles of your vocal tract and translate those subtle movements into words? All of these exist. Why bother translating the natural language to C++? If you can parse the command to generate the code, you can parse and execute the command just as well. Let's try Pascal, with a little help from the development environment: "program foo [opens file, moves to program block] var [moves to global var block] i integer [inserts : before integer and ; after] begin [moves to program begin block] for i becomes 1 to 10 do begin writeln [inserts (] i sem [inserts ) beforeAlmost all the pieces for a sane computer are out there, and according to The Register MSFT is already working on decoupling the user base from things like files. They expect it to be ready by 2004 or so, which means we have until 2005 (the probable actual release date) to best them.
-jhp
-jhp
I guess the trick is to patent whatever costs $5k to put in a box today, because it'll cost about $100 within ten years.
-jhp
If you damage the drive or media, why are you buying such cheap disks anyway? Aren't you running a business on those?
That's part of the problem. The other problem is that Linux GUIs don't have a Linus Torvalds to bitchslap people in an entertaining way and lead coders toward one goal. I'd love to take a bullwhip to all these wieners who think overriding or ignoring the user's color preferences, or drawing pretty pictures of LED's and molded plastic front panels, none of which match any other app, makes a computer usable. If you've got $100 million in the bank and you're a relatively high-profit customer, you've got more of an ear listening to you than the small depositor. Even then, the pragmatic thing to do might be to suck it up and run WINE.-jhp
-jhp
-jhp
There are several qualitative differences which your simplistic views on sexual propriety refuse to recognize: the involvement of other people, the lack of consent, the possible lack of understanding on the part of the other, the social taboos against the other, the purposes for which the activity is sought (self-love vs. self- or other-hate),and so forth. Then again, the Big Guy threatened to kill you if you fall out of line, so it's not surprising you ignore these other dimensions of comparison.
I hope you're not trying for any logic points here. If I remember my logical fallacies correctly, you're begging the question and/or appealing to false authority. Incidentally, Maggie Gallagher made this same point in an article on why we should shun gays, and it was every bit as nonsensical coming from a traitor to womanhood as from you.Consider this: Essentially every major world religion has gotten major by taking control of its adherents' procreative powers, which are firmly tied into human expression and thought, and harnessing them toward the religion's worldly political ends. Sexual deprivation renders people more gullible, less willing to think, more willing to wield gross power and kill. By controlling the purposes for which sexual energy may be "innocently" expended, you can "guilt" your adherents into breeding your religion into majority. Catholicism in a nutshell.
It's equally possible we just don't hear about the sex-positivity of other religions because the military-ecclesiastical complex destroyed every remnant of their existence.
Nice try. You take a bunch of disparate sexual acts and try to compress them onto one dimension. The only observable data from this is how bad you think these particular sex acts are, and frankly no one cares what you do with your own genitals.Furthermore, the only commonality between any of these acts is that you happen to think these are all "bad" sex acts. Your conjecture is unprovable, unless you appeal to the same authorities to whom you have given control over your sexuality to, which ultimately degenerates to "Because He said so" or "Because He threatened to kill me if I don't". This is hardly the sort of justification a thinking man would accept.
There is no hard and fast dividing line because the capacity to meaningfully consent to sexual activities depends on their understanding of sexual activity, its effects and risks, its possible consequences to their community and their standing in it, is aware of and has chosen ways to mitigate negative risks, and is scrupulously honest. Certain elements of socialization happen at different ages in different children, different households, and different cultures. There can be 14-year-olds who are capable of giving meaningful consent by this definition, but who simply aren't interested in playing with someone else yet. There can be 25-year-olds who, as a consequence of congenital or hereditary mental illness, are not capable of consent under this definition (and, looking around me, plenty of 25-year-olds who fail just by that last criterion of honesty). There is no such thing as 100% safe anywhere in life, you fool. If you want 100% safe, check yourself into a mental institution and pretend no other inmates will assault you and that the place won't burn down. Otherwise, grow up and deal with the fact that LIFE IS RISKY. If you've been at all involved in the Internet rat race in a technical capacity, you understand something called "redundancy". You probably also have the capacity to multiply probabilities and to understand how probabilities are useful. Percentages are approximate, and per year:- Condom = 90% effective, including user error.
- Oral hormonal contraceptive = 98% effective, including user error.
- Spermicidal foam, jelly, etc. = 96% effective, including user error.
- Vasectomy = I think this one is four or five nines (99.99% - 99.999%).
- Tubal barrier methods: three nines (99.9%).
We assume a fertile lifespan of 35 years (14-49) for a female, that a single failure event is 100% likely to cause a pregnancy or STD, and that the woman is continually sexually active with a fertile and infected partner throughout that period. Using only condoms with an average amount of care, and assuming that a single failure event is 100% likely to cause pregnancy, the female can expect to become pregnant and/or infected three times during their fertile lifespan. By only involving herself with known, certified, uninfected partners, the risk of infection drops to zero. By adding oral contraceptives, taken with average care, the chances for a pregnancy drop to 1 in 15 throughout her fertile life. You can do the rest of the math, I'm sure. Don't waste your time; none of them stand up to serious rigor and none of them are anything but bald conjecture with nothing to back it up. I don't believe so. I believe the difference of "type" comes from the spirit in which sexual gratification is sought and partaken of, and whether the two or more parties involved are honest and aboveboard about everything pertinent. If you want a broodmare, fine; just be honest and aboveboard about it so folks who think sex is more than a "duty to the Party" can avoid you. You mean like how excessive procreation, in the era of lengthened lifespans, minuscule incidence of infant mortality, and the overvaluing of human life, might be harmful to society and the planet? You don't say. I agree without reservation.-jhp
-jhp
Delicious and nutritious!
-jhp
I'm also greatly amused by the technological equivalent to "Bring your note to the front of the class and share it with everyone". I still don't want to see that on a computer I own.
-jhp
-jhp (Remember, kids: practice safe crypto)
Anyway all you'd have to do is 0wn the signature machine, break enough signatures that they turn the alarm off, and the rest of the site is yours. Social engineering is often the most effective attack.
-jhp
-jhp
All the same, I think I'm with the "who cares" crowd on this one. What does it do besides "me too"? I don't think I'll care about any new OS until it's fully object-driven and secondary storage is transparent to the applications programmer. Then we'll talk.
-jhp
-jhp
And that's "your", not "you're". If they brought back literacy testing as a precondition to voting, we wouldn't be having these problems.
I don't have to accept any types of thinking other than my own. Ideas themselves are the only germane point of argument. Fact check: he just banned recovery from not just embryos, which is what you get just after the fertilized ovum divides and several weeks before a fetus, but waste embryos from such sources as redundancy for fertility treatments. I don't see that there are any morald to discuss: you either take what life you can from it and flush it, or you flush it. Which one is more pro-life, and why aren't they being consistent?Furthermore, most moral discussions are ignorant because the people involved are wailing and gnashing their teeth, usually to the exclusion of critically examining their own views, seeking out and examining evidence, and so on. If most Americans could be bothered to exercise any more discernment over their uninformed opinions besides "The guy in the black robe told me so", we wouldn't be having this battle.
Power makes old men drunk.
-jhp
Forced-birthers are too hung up on the quantity of potential life and demonstrate almost no concern about the quality of life for those who have developed nervous systems and can appreciate it. Their real concern is probably not life, but power. Religious extremists need to shut up and deal until such time as I can opt out of paying for oil wars in Saudi Arabia.
All in all, I think it's good that a leading technologist (who has done more for society than the sadistic oppressive whore known as Mother Teresa) suggested that mysticism has no place in science.
-jhp
An application demanding that a double-right-click behave in a particular fashion is only an innovation in the Microsoft sense of the term.
Berlin's message is this: application software micromanaging the user interface is a dead end, and rude too. Introducing a level of indirection gives the user control by plugging and unplugging toolkits to do things the app programmer never thought of. If the UI toolkit becomes scriptable, every well-formed Berlin client program becomes scriptable. If the UI toolkit supports blind users' I/O devices, every well-formed Berlin client supports blind users' I/O devices.If you want to innovate, then innovate a new toolkit. I suspect you're less interested in innovation than shoving your ideas down the users' throats.
-jhp
-jhp
Wouldn't this make Forth and similar small-footprint environments a natural choice for devices such as sub-$100 PDA's, and why does it seem that line of development is completely unexplored?
-jhp
I maintain that OS'es should save as much system state across power-downs as they can, along the lines of APM sleep/wake (or better yet using an OS built out of persistent objects that can boot instantly and page in whatever is needed, on demand). Hell, with that no-POSTing BIOS and APM sleep/wake, you can already do a ten-second power-on without harming any non-volatile memory devices whatsoever. THIS IS NOT ROCKET SURGERY, FFOLKES.
-jhp
The major problem is the chipsets and the 20-year-old designs they're based around. Drop in full 32-or-more-bit DMA controllers or require all peripherals be bus-master capable, segregate the ISA bus to its own out-of-the-way 16MB window somewhere (see: Apollo DNx000 family), hardwire a handful of interrupts and a hardcoded address range to each slot (see: EISA), drop the legacy keyboard/mouse interface, and redo IDE entirely (see: SCSI). While we're at it, let's scrap BIOS and replace it with OpenBoot. Now there's a machine free of legacy crap that might be worth writing home about.
-jhp
Local HDSL (aka T-1) loops are about as cheap as you'd want them. Any cheaper and your provider won't roll a truck immediately when it goes down.
Point being, if you don't know exactly what you're talking about, perhaps you shouldn't be proposing legislation, lest you be seen as the same sort of self-interested whiner that begs for perpetual copyright. Nobody owes anyone anything.
-jhp